After eliminating the old blog posts during a content audit, which are no longer useful for the audience, you must put all your focus on preparing an action plan for the post you have decided to keep. Keep reading to find out how to do it in 3 steps.
Step I: Update
These are the essential things that you must do to update your old posts.
1) Add the latest information
Google aims to deliver the most recent information to the audience because that’s what they are looking for.
This is the year 2020, and neither do people nor Google will appreciate that they receive information which was last valued in 2015.
You must perform new research on the topic, and while you are at it, you must keep in mind these things to ensure a better SERP performance:
– Study what your competitors have covered in their posts
– Check that all the links point to the appropriate blog/source
– Replace links to old stats/data with the latest ones
– Remove parts of the content which you find no longer relevant
– Add the latest content to the blog.
Ensure that the word count is around or more than 1500 words.
2) Conduct fresh keyword research and optimize accordingly
When updating your content with the latest information, conduct new keyword research as well. It is crucial to keep updating your content with the current keyword trends because it keeps on changing.
3) Revisit SEO metadata and refresh the content
After updating your keyword database with the latest keywords, you should optimize your content and SEO metadata with the primary keywords. Also, you must rewrite their content with a fresh perspective and refine the information.
All the components of metadata which needs revisiting include:
– Title tag
– Heading tags (H1, H2, H3,…H6)
– Meta description
– Alt tags.
NOTE: When updating the SEO metadata, remember not to change the URL structure. If you do, then all your inbound links will return the error code 404 (page does not exist) to both the users and the crawlers.
4) Revise EVERYTHING!
You must proofread everything. Go through all the pages on your website and revise everything so that the errors related to spelling, typos, etc. are all resolved. These errors have a slight effect on your SERP rankings. However, repairing them can help your content rank better.
Other than the spelling errors and typos, here are the other things you should focus on when proofreading your content:
– Check that all the links are placed relevantly with appropriate anchor texts
– Ensure that the keyword placement is organic (i.e. it is not stuffed but placed according to their relevance) in the content body and the SEO metadata
– Find out the keyword density of the article. Remember to keep it between 1 and 3 for optimum optimization
The SEO metadata has to be checked too. Make sure that you’ve structured your content with appropriate heading tags, alt tags, title tags, meta description, etc
– Make sure that enough images are used in the post for optimum engagement.
Step II: Recycle
This is what you can do with the old blogs that still have the potential for improving your SERP performance but with a different approach.
1) Turn blog posts into infographics
One of the best ways to recycle your old content is to turn them into infographics. There are two reasons to do so:
– Infographics are the best of both worlds. They present data in both textual and visual format.
– They are shared on Social Media 3 times more than any other form of content.
So, when you are converting your old blogs to infographics, you must keep these things in mind:
– Concise your blog into valuable pointers that are quick to grasp and understand
– Prepare an attractive layout with graphs, images, etc.
– Choose easy-to-read fonts. Use a maximum of 3 font types
– Stick to your chosen color scheme
– Share it as much as you can on platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.
– Provide all the sources to your data
– Remember to keep textual data to a minimum. Express more through visuals. It can take some time to ideate and prepare attractive infographics so you can use various online tools to make impressive infographics.
2) Using blog posts for videos and podcasts
Over the years, the popularity of videos and podcasts has increased.
If we were to focus on the stats, you would find that 4 Billion videos are streamed on YouTube every day, and 92% of B2B prospects consume videos online. Also, a study by Cisco predicted that by 2021, videos would account for 82% of all consumer traffic.
Moreover, there are over 750,000 podcasts and more than 35 million episodes (as of June 2019). Also, 80% of people listen to all or most of each podcast episode and an average of 7 shows per week.
The theme for your videos and podcasts can be based out of your old blogs. You can also add links to your updated old blogs to your related videos and podcasts.
3) Turn blog posts into eBooks
If you have several old posts that cover the same topic, you can utilize that content, update it, and create an ebook.
For example, if you have three separate articles on email marketing, you can compile them in an ebook that unifies all of them in one place.
Step III: Promote
The final and the most crucial step: Promotion.
You may update and recycle your old posts, but if you are not promoting them, then what are all your efforts worth?
So, here are some of the most popular ways that you can put into practice and boost the traffic driven to your old blogs while helping them improve their rankings.
1) Feature blog posts in your newsletters
72% of people subscribe to newsletters because they want to learn more and keep themselves updated about topics that interest them from your domain.
By subscribing to your newsletters, users permit you to send them emails with more interesting blogs to read. This ‘permission’ increases the probability of recipients clicking on the featured blogs and interacting with them.
So, you can include links to your old blogs along with the news ones to our newsletters and boost their traffic and engagement.
2) Internally link your latest and old blogs
Once your old posts are updated, hyperlink them to the blogs published recently on your domain. Linking your latest blogs to the old ones makes it convenient for the crawlers to discover it.
However, when you are internally linking the two posts, remember to optimize the anchor texts. Hyperlinking ‘click here’ to direct crawlers to another page is not considered optimum optimization. So, instead of ‘click here’ you must use anchor text which is relevant to the linked post.
3) Link them to your guest blogs
Link building is an SEO strategy that never rests. Websites consistently build links to improve their SERP performance and rankings. And when we talk about link building, guest blogging is the first way that comes to mind.
You must be reaching out to grab as many guest posting opportunities as possible from high authority domains. So, every chance you get, remember to link your old posts to the guest blogs. This is an efficient way of promoting your old post because:
– Your reach increases
– More people will engage and interact with the post
– Crawlers will be directed to your old post more often.
Another powerful way of building links is blog and forum commenting. In this process, you can include links to your old post in the comments.
However, before adding the links, you must check the guidelines to see whether the website allows adding links or not. Because if it doesn’t, there’s a strong chance that you’ll be marked as spam.
4) Extensive sharing on Social Media
One can never forget about Social Media sharing because it is an immovable part of online marketing.
When you are done with updating and converting your old posts into valuable ones based on the needs of the current audience, you should promote it extensively on Social Media. You must study the analytics of each Social Media handle and publish the posts when the relevant audience for your content is mostly active.
If you publish the post at the right time, you can improve its engagement rate; plus, it can receive more shares.
Contact TheIuvo today and you won’t have to worry about your content ever again!
